Friday, January 4, 2013

Android Power

So over the Christmas period, I had the time to update all my Android Apps. It had started to pain me as there seemed to be so many so often and those ones that required a Manual Update, "why" I asked, and therefore had to look. Anyway, it took time, was low on priorities, had no real down sides for not doing, so was neglected.

But, since I've updated everything, I've found that I'm getting considerably more battery life out of my HTC Desire, yes it's about 3 years old, runs T-Mod Express 3.2.1 and still is great. Obviously depending on use, I'm getting what I consider to be some great battery life for this phone. These are the best after I started noticing the difference, but the average is probably about 27 hours (1d 3h on battery), which is about a 5 or 6 hour improvement. Obviously the 1d 11h screen shot shows that it's nearly 9am, so the phone has gone two nights which are low usage times, but the other two have spanned two day times!

Now I hate the poor battery of smart phones as much as the next person and can recount stories of my nokia running for a week between charges and believe things have to change. And we are seeing some potential changes. The E-Ink system used by Amazons Kindle is being played with as detailed by C-Net a while ago and words again from C-Net this week about Ubuntu coming to mobile phones as an OS.

The fact of the matter is that they are going to have to enhance battery technology pretty seriously to keep up with the increasing range of apps, people are developing apps for anything these days, although this is for iPad rather than a smart phone, it illustrates my point! So this coupled with the fact that better batteries WILL mean that developers will cut development costs by not making apps as power saving as they can and allow lazy developers to get away with not even trying, I think means that we are going to have to put up with 1 to 3 day smart phone battery power for a while.